Influence of change management enablers towards the implementation of payroll information systems: a case in Ministry of Defense / Normahanim Abd Majid

One of the main reasons to why people resist change is when the change threatens to modify established patterns of working relationships between them and their business processes and procedures. Whilst the decision makers decided that the proposed change will be bringing about a greater good and advantage towards the organization as a whole, they must be able to encourage and nurture the confidence of the affected stakeholders upon accepting it. Thus the mutual understanding between the people and the decision makers must be harmonized through the efforts of the designated change agents or enablers. These issues could be related to the situation being faced by the Jabatan Arah Urusan Gaji ATM (UGAT), Kementerian Pertahanan Malaysia, where they are placing aggressive efforts in launching their new payroll information system, UGATNet to replace their legacy system SMG Telnet. Their main users ,finding it hard and difficult to adapt thus accept the change, which will alter their daily working procedures. At the same time, the decision makers are struggling to find ways to allow the new system to be fully accepted within the organization. The importance on understanding specific enablers of change to match this situation will become one of the final and most crucial phase of making the imposed change accepted and successfully implemented, thus optimizing the use of the new system. Thus in order to study the relationship between the change enablers and the payroll information system implementation, this research started by collecting data using across-sectional survey within the organization in order to observe the users perception upon the interdependencies between all the change management enabler categories which are; organizational support for change, project-planning process and proactive technological orientation, among themselves and towards the UGATNet's implementation. Analysis results, which were structured based on the proposed research model, have proven the relational and the correlation between all three categories of change management enablers and towards UGAT Net's implementation. In the end the research manages to support the hypothesis in where all three change management enabler categories are associated with the successful implementation of UGATNet. The research also proposed Kotter's Eight Steps to Successful Change as the change management action plan to be taken by the organization in order to enforce an ongoing effort to promote and sustaining the change within the organization.